Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
2, 2007
Alan Cholodenko
(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix1 Part II: A Difficulty in the Path of Animation Studies2
Before I set out on the work of this paper (Part II) I will briefly reprise Part I to orient the reader. Subtitled Kingdom of Shadows, Part I argues the singular importance of animation to cinema and to film, and the singular importance of death to animation, hence to cinema and to film. Part I is a return engagement with Tom Gunnings canonical article, An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator, an article establishing Gunnings notion of the cinema of attractions as the now orthodox understanding of what early cinema is in Film Studies. I had first taken up his article in my piece The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema, published in Cultural Studies Review (2004). That article extends, qualifies and recasts Gunnings formulation of his cinema of attractions, including by rereading Maxim Gorkys review of his experience of the Lumire Bros cinematograph at the Nizhni-Novgorod fair in Russia July 4, 1896, a review that is for Gunning as for ourself not only the first substantial account of cinema but one that is paradigmatic in and for its understanding of it. The most significant point in this return engagement with Gunning is that in elaborating the nature of his cinema of attractions, Gunning unwittingly makes animation the first attraction of cinema, the last attraction of cinema and the enduring attraction of cinema, thereby likewise unwittingly makes his cinema of attractions animation of attractions. In so doing, Gunning confirms our still apparently radical notion, articulated in so many publications, that not only is animation a form of film, all film, including cinema by definition, is a form of animation. For the largest reach on what this animation of attractions of shocks, thrills and chills and these attractions of animation would be, it is to Gorkys review we turned, with its famous opening lines:
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre. Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumonts and saw Lumires cinmatograph moving photography. (Gorky, 1996 p.5)
Not life but its shadow, not motion but its soundless spectre. As I argue in The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema, Gorkys paradigmatic experience of cinema makes the spectre ur figure of cinema and the uncanny ur experience of cinema. Put simply, the first, last and enduring
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The title of this paper is to be read Death the Animator, the Death of the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix. The first part of this paper, subtitled Kingdom of Shadows, was presented at the Animated Dialogues conference in Melbourne 17-19 June, 2007.
Taking off from our claim that it is the uncanny sense of the dead returning to life and at the same time the living returning to death, reanimated likewise as living dead, that informs Maxim Gorkys response to his first sight and experience of cinema a response that repeatedly characterises these living moving forms as shadows, spectres the work of the first section of Part II is to extend the reach of this spectre for any thinking of animation. Then, in the second section, we will cast its shadow over something that has been fundamental to animation studies, the thinking of the subject as form of presence, of essence, as unified and as centred, a subject that for animation studies achieves its fullest expression in the figure of the animator. It is to etymology that we now turn to embark upon the work of this first section. While the word animation is rooted in Latin anima, it goes by another name in Greek, whose significance for our argument cannot be overstated. The equivalent for anima in Greek is psuch. Psuch, as Jean-Pierre Vernant tells us (Vernant, 1991, p.186), is a form of eidolon. Eidolon in Greek means double. Psuch is the simulacral figure, the spectre, that leaves the body of the dead one to wander as flitting shade in Hades, which is, not insignificantly for us, Gorkys Kingdom of Shadows, his (for us) Kingdom of Cinema, of Animation. No matter that Plato turned psuch the spectre into psyche the soul, he for us was never able to master the spectre who could?! a failure reanimated in every attempt by all his avatars to be master of the games played by the world and its objects, including master of cinema, of film animation be it maker, analyst, theorist, spectator an aspiration and failure so chillingly marked and victoriously mocked by that psuch of Norman Bates/mother/skull that ends Hitchcocks aptly titled Psycho (1960), that shade/shadow laughing at all efforts to psychoanalyse, explain and rationalise it and turning the subject and all it commands towards what is superior, anterior and never not returning to it: death.3
3 For an analysis of a singular precedent for us for such a turn, see Jacques Lacans treatment of the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbeins famous painting The Ambassadors (1533) in his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, and Slavoj ieks treatment of it after Lacan in Looking Awry.
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Inherited in all ontologies of cinema, most famously Andr Bazins. Indeed, Vernant writes, The psuch is a nothing, an empty thing, an ungraspable evanescence, a shade (1991 p.189) 6 On animation as blind spot of cinema and media studies, see my Animation Film and Media Studies Blind Spot, published in the S ociety for Animation Studies Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2007. The notion of blind spot, and of animation as blind spot, posited here is radically different from what is broached there. In the sense posited here, blind spot is that device that is at once unseen, in fact is never seen, but that allows one to see, is the very condition of possibility of sight the blindness that make sight at once possible and impossible. In such a light, animation becomes the blind spot of the blind spot, the blind spot as such. No longer something Film Studies, or anything or anybody, for that matter, does not wish to see but rather can not, can never, see, wish to or not. By the by, that blind spot makes seeing oneself seeing oneself the very premise of self-reflexivity, of auto-reflection impossible per se. 7 In other words, he saw Death in its penultimate form, as did the soldier who unexpectedly encountered Death in the marketplace before his rendez-vous with Death in Samarkand, a tale related by Baudrillard in his book Seduction.
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Here our second issue of singular importance for animation studies (one we have implicitly canvassed already). That issue is the way animation studies places the individual at the very core of animation in the figure of the animator, envisioned as all-controlling, master subject, the subject par excellence. It does so and for a field that reads animation almost exclusively through the subject and the subjects desires, intentions, affects and effects, where identity is the key if not sole model, focus and attractor, strangely drawing to it, while at the same time subordinating to it, all else, at the same time ignoring the other, and for us superior, side of the equation: the object and its games, the games of the world, with which for us animation has privileged, superior, indeed singular, relation, marked in our very figure of the animatic. Likewise, any thinking of cinema and animation cannot delimit itself to treating them as only modes of production and appearance9 but must as well consider them as modes of seduction, dissemination, disappearance and death likewise for us superior processes associated with the animatic. For us, animation studies, in largely reading up to today all through the subject and/as individual, and through the animator as the very essence of the subject and/as individual, and through identity and self-identity, propounds and is wedded to an understanding partial at best and radically deficient at worst. And more, to an understanding that is dramatically, and seemingly unknowingly, retrograde in terms of Film Studies, film criticism and film theory and their history insofar as it animation studies poses, embraces and models the animator as the very limit case of the filmmaker, that is, as author. To use the French term, as auteur, that
Indeed, for us, Deleuzes definition in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), p. 5, of how the cartoon film, that is, animation, can be cinema is a definition of how cinema is animation(!) a definition for us that is remarkably avatar of Norman McLarens famous one even as Deleuze makes the time-image the phantom which has always haunted the cinema (Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 41), haunting, strangely returning to and reanimating his movement-image, which is never not time-image for him. In other words, for Deleuze cinema is never not spectre, never not for us therefore of the order of animation as the animatic. 9 This limitation is typical of Anglo-American Film Studies, too. See my Introduction to THE ILLUSION OF LIFE: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications in association with the Australian Film Commission, 1991), pp. 14 and 21, and my OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR: The Virtual Reality of Jurassic Park and Jean Baudrillard, in Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg (London: Sage Publications, 1997), pp. 82-83, note 19, republished in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, January 2005, on the web. (ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies).
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For our critique of the ontologising of frame-by-frame construction, see the Introduction to THE ILLUSION OF LIFE, p. 36, note 34, and my Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or The Framing of Animation essay in the book, p. 237, note 13. For other responses to that construction, consult the essays in THE ILLUSION OF LIFE 2: More Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 2007) by Pauline Moore and Annemarie Jonson.
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See the Introduction to THE ILLUSION OF LIFE 2, p. 83, note 65, which this last paragraph extends and complicates in terms of Barthes article. That note also references several key thinkers in animation studies who promulgate the orthodox notion of the sovereignty and total control of the animation auteur.
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Bibliography
Barthes, R. (1977), The Death of the Author, Image-Music-Text, Hill & Wang, New York. Baudrillard, J. (2000), The Vital Illusion, Columbia University Press, New York. Baudrillard, J. (2001), Impossible Exchange, Verso, London. Cholodenko, A. (1991), Introduction to A. Cholodenko (ed), THE ILLUSION OF LIFE: Essays on Animation, Power Publications in association with the Australian Film Commission, Sydney. Cholodenko, A. (1991), Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or The Framing of Animation, in A Cholodenko (ed), THE ILLUSION OF LIFE: Essays on Animation, Power Publications in association with the Australian Film Commission, Sydney. Cholodenko, A. (1997), OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR: The Virtual Reality of Jurassic Park and Jean Baudrillard, in N. Zurbrugg (ed), Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, Sage Publications, London, republished 2005 in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, January, Bishops University, Canada (http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/). Cholodenko, A. (2004) The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 10, no. 2, September 2004. Cholodenko, A. (2006), The Nutty Universe of Animation, the Discipline of All Disciplines, And Thats Not All, Folks!, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, January, Bishops University, Canada (http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/). Cholodenko, A. (2007), (ed) THE ILLUSION OF LIFE 2: More Essays on Animation, Power Publications, Sydney. Cholodenko, A. (2007), Animation Film and Media Studies Blind Spot, Society for Animation Studies Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring (http://gertie.animationstudies.org/) Crafton, D. (1982), Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
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